Summary:

Dr. Dymov is an earnest and rather boring young physician, who is preoccupied with his patients and his research. Olga, his wife, craves the excitement and gaiety of the artistic life. She discovers a new lease on romance with Ryabovsky, a colorful landscape artist, who takes her on a cruise on the Volga River. As they spoon under the stars, Olga and her lover make light of her bumptious stay-at-home husband.

After she returns from the cruise, Dymov forgives her infidelity, but in Olga's mind, his forgiveness proves to be another strike against the poor slob, since she just can't stand his complaisant devotion. She runs back to Ryabovsky for a while, until he makes it clear that he is bored with her.

Then one day Dymov develops diphtheria, evidently contracted by "sucking up the mucus through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was stupid . . . just from folly." Dymov soon becomes delirious, and then dies. Suddenly, Olga is overcome with guilt and grief. Too late, Olga realizes that her husband was a hero.

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A country doctor, Gregory Ovchinnikov, begins his daily rounds in the hospital. He soon notes that his assistant, Smirnovsky, is drunk. When the assistant refuses to obey an order and snaps back at him, Ovchinnikov hits the man in his face. The angry physician then rushes out of the ward and goes back to his lodgings.

At first, he considers demanding that the town council fire Smirnovsky. Later, after he goes back to work, Orchinnikov begins to wonder about the enormity of his unprofessional act--perhaps the town council will fire him. Strangely, when the assistant comes to apologize, the doctor indicates that it is he--the doctor--who has behaved inexcusably. The assistant is stunned, but decides to complain to the council. Of course, the council demands that the (lower class) Smirnovsky apologize to the (upper class) Ovchinnikov.

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The physician Tsvyetkov visits a child who is dying of a brain tumor, and the boy's mother. There is no hope, nothing to be done. Tsvyetkov has had one romantic fling in his life; when he was younger, he had an affair with the boy's mother. She has always told him that Misha was his son. Yet she also had affairs with other men around the same time; one of them might be the father. Tsvyetkov suspects that she insists that he is the father just so he will continue to make payments to support them, which he has always done. As he leaves, he asks the boy's mother one last time, "It can make no difference now. Is the boy mine?" She hesitates for a moment, but answers, "Yes. he is your son."

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Summary:

Vladimir Semyonich Liadovsky fancies himself a literary man; he writes book reviews. His sister, Vera Semyonovna, is a young widowed physician who doesn't practice. She lives with Vladimir and does nothing but lie around and wonder, "What is the meaning of non-resistance to evil?" As she becomes more obsessed with this question, her relationship with her brother worsens.

Finally, she abruptly announces that she is leaving--she will go into the provinces to do vaccination work. Vladimir doesn't regret her leaving. He continues to write his articles, falls ill, and dies. The narrator doesn't know what happened to Vera.

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Summary:

Princess Vera Gavrilovna visits a monastery on her way to a friend's house. She loves to share the beauty of her presence with the monks, and to have a day or two of peace and quiet. She encounters the doctor who cares for the monks. He is polite, but cool and distant.

When she begs him to explain her "mistake," he goes into a lengthy diatribe describing how vain and selfish she is, and how heartless to her servants. In fact, many years before she had fired the doctor for no reason. The accusations offend her and she begins to cry. The doctor withdraws. The next morning, as she leaves the monastery, the doctor comes up to her and abjectly apologizes for being carried away by "an evil, vindictive feeling."

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Summary:

This is a selection of very early Chekhov tales, dating from his years in medical school (1879-1884). These nine examples of the work Chekhov churned out during those years to support himself and his family have never previously been published in English. They are all quite short. Of most interest are "How I Came to Be Lawfully Wed," "A Hypnotic Seance," "Intrigues," "In Autumn," and "At the Pharmacy."

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Summary:

A district doctor and an examining magistrate are on their way to an inquest. The magistrate tells the story of a young pregnant woman who "foretold her own death" shortly after giving birth. Though she was apparently healthy, she simply closed her eyes and "gave up her soul to God." This tale, the magistrate contends, is an illustration of how inexplicable life can be.

No, the doctor responds, there is no effect without a cause. The woman probably poisoned herself, the doctor explains. Her husband was unfaithful. She wished to commit suicide, but did not want to harm the unborn baby. Thus, she waited until after her confinement. The magistrate is overwhelmed with grief--in fact, the story is that of his own wife. His infidelity may have caused her suicide!

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Summary:

This is a collection of 23 stories, five of which take the form of "letters" in which an older physician (not surprisingly, a surgeon) gives advice to an imaginary young surgeon. However, every one of the stories "fits" as a tale that might be told in such a letter--assuming the author was a wise and gifted writer, in addition to being a surgeon.

The book begins with the gift of a physical diagnosis textbook on the occasion of the young doctor's graduation ("Textbook") and ends with a reflection on "your first autopsy" ("Remains"). Among the other stories are Imelda (see annotation), Brute (see annotation), Toenails (see annotation), Mercy (see annotation), "A Pint of Blood," "Witness," "The Virgin and the Petri Dish," and "Impostor."

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Summary:

This is a new collection of poetry and short prose by nurses, edited by Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer, whose remarkable first anthology, Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses [see annotation in this database], may be the founding document of "nurse writing" as a recognizable genre. In the Foreword, Cortney Davis comments on the process of selection and sketches the similarities and differences between this and the previous volume.

One of the interesting similarities is that nurses write more often about birth than death; one of the differences is the wider range of topics, including nurses who reveal their own experiences as patients (see Amy Haddad, "Conversations with Wendy," pp. 100-102) and others whose fatigue and frustration cause them to step away from nursing (see Pamela Mitchell, "A Nurse's Farewell," pp., 149-151)

As in Between the Heartbeats, the authors of Intensive Care appear in alphabetical order, which favors variety and surprise over categorization. In "Medical Ward," the first poem (pp. 1-2), Krys Ahlman captures many of the themes of the anthology. "I was wearing a thousand tiny failures," Ahlman writes, and concludes: "I held out my hand, I said / I am not afraid to cry."

Intensive Care is full of delights. As advertised, there is much about bringing children into the world and caring for them; for example, Lynn Bernardini's reminiscence, "Does This Day Mean Anything to You?" about having given up her own baby for adoption (pp. 11-16); Celia Brown's poem "Forget-Me-Nots" (pp. 35-36); and the powerful but ambiguous hope of "Neonatal ICU" (Leigh Wilkerson, p.247). There are the painful memories of dying children and adolescents, especially Jeanne Bryner's amazing, "Breathless" (p. 42) and "Car Spotting, " (pp. 173-184), a story by Christine Rahn about a terminally ill adolescent. In "Car Spotting" the head nurse criticizes the young narrator because, "You become too personally involved with the patients . . . Nurses must make decisions based on objective data. Becoming too attached can cloud professional judgment." (p. 175) I found this an interesting statement coming from a nursing instructor--it could well have been made by a professor of medicine to a third year medical student.

Other major themes include the humor of nursing (see "RX for Nurses: Brag!" by Kathleen Walsh Spencer, p. 203; and "What Nurses Do on Their Day Off," Judy Schaefer, p. 188); women's health (see "Every Day, the Pregnant Teenagers," Cortney Davis, p 69; and "Redemption at the Women's Center," Jeanne Lavasseur, pp. 132-133); nursing the elderly (see "Home Visits," Paula Sergi, pp. 195-196); and the wonderful narratives of patient care (see "Sarah's Pumpkin Bread," Terry Evans, pp. 87-90; "Edna's Star," Chris Grant," pp. 95-99; and "That Mystique," Madeline Mysko, pp. 158-167). Finally, Intensive Care looks back thoughtfully in a number of pieces to nursing in military settings.

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The title The Body in the Library suggests medicine (the body) as seen through literary eyes. True enough, this collection of stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from longer works is subtitled "A Literary Anthology of Modern Medicine." However, as Iain Bamforth points out in his introduction, nowadays we are more concerned with "the library in the body" (p. xxiv); that is, we believe the truth of human illness can be found by biochemical tests and positron scans, rather than by storytelling. In this anthology Bamforth uses literature itself to document this change in perspective. Beginning with "The Black Veil" (1836), an early sketch by Charles Dickens, Bamforth recounts the recent history of medicine as seen by poets and writers, many of whom were (and are) physicians themselves.

Part of the anthology consists of material already annotated in this database. This includes stories (e.g. Conan Doyle’s "The Curse of Eve" from Round the Red Lamp, Kafka’s A Country Doctor, and Williams’s Jean Beicke); excerpts from novels (e.g. "The Operation" from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, "The Fever Ward" from Camus’ The Plague, and "Doctor Glas" from Hjalmar Soderberg’s novel, Doctor Glas); and essays (e.g. Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill and John Berger’s "Clerk of Their Records" from A Fortunate Man).

However, most of the selections have not previously been noted in this database, nor do they appear in other recent anthologies. Iain Bamforth has discovered some wonderful "new" material on the medical experience. This includes several poems by the German physician-poet Gottfried Benn (pp. 151-153); and a brief piece by neurologist-writer Alfred Döblin ("My Double," pp. 177-179), in which the physician Döblin and the writer Döblin describe their respective "doubles" in rather detached and negative terms.

Another delight is the series of selections from Miguel Torga’s diary (pp. 256-278); Torga (1907-1995) was a provincial Portuguese medical practitioner for 60 years. Among the other pieces are short excerpts from plays by Georg Buchner, Jules Romains, and Karl Valentin; and poems by Weldon Kees, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Dannie Abse, Robert Pinsky, Miroslav Holub , and Thom Gunn.

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